But a true hypermiler would never use A/C!!
I guess you're in Florida, so that beats Georgia, but last summer here in Atlanta I had no A/C and well I just wore like shorts and a tank top every day. When I was on the highway I'd have the windows up. Sure was hot, but I got great MPG!!
Windows always came down at low speed//coming to a stop lol.
But, going back to the IMA again, my record was without using the battery. I had the clutch switch on the whole time. When coming to a stop I'd disable it to get regen but I kept the battery at the top two bars almost the whole time. This means no background charging, which would normally be an MPG killer. But I still had use of auto-stop via my auto-stop switch. In any case, my thought was if I had to use the brakes then I must have done something wrong from a hypermiling perspective. But the IMA likewise sucks up momentum, so if you're charging the IMA you are probably doing something wrong, once again from a hypermiling perspective. Conservation of momentum is fuel economy. I don't think anything else matters more than that, and something like the IMA that gets in the way of that is not helping.
But.... having the IMA barely functional, as I did, where I was regening when in situations where I was forced to brake, is probably a good plan because then the IMA is still maintaining the 12V battery. So I guess if I regen down a hill or coming into a stop, then that means I got regen energy going into the 12V instead of burning fuel directly for that purpose. But you could of course say that every time I was in regen that means I screwed up somewhere earlier by allowing myself to enter a situation where I needed to slow down with regen. This is all probably starting to sound really convoluted, please forgive me. Clearly a better solution would be use solar power or grid power to top off the 12-v before driving and then avoid using any peripherals, but then we're going yet another level deeper into hypermiling.